Mother-Daughter+Transformations+in+‘The+Leaving

Summary of “The Leaving” by Budge Wilson: In this story, a daughter reflects back on a life changing experience with her mother. At 3 am one spring morning, a mother wakes her child and tells her they’re leaving their home. It’s a home where the women know their place. The mother and daughter cook, clean, and do all the chores for the household. The mother decides to take her daughter on this coming of age journey for both of them. They leave the men of the house alone to fend for themselves. Trekking 10 kilometers from their home to a train station, they make their way to a city where they spend 3 days together. On this trip they see multiple images of freedom and get to experience a taste of what it feels like to not be under the control of the men in their lives. The mother even tells her daughter that a college education is possible for her. After the mother says it’s time to leave, they both return home with a new outlook, and their lives take on subtle changes. For example, after standing up for herself, the father stops calling the mother woman and starts calling her by her name: Elizabeth. At the end of the story the mother has her own haven in the home with her sewing machine and her books and the daughter is speaking of this experience as someone who has made it out of the home and who goes to the University.

Summary of the Chapter: “One of the objectives of feminist theory and criticism is to bring about change, to make a new world in which women speak and write with their own powerful language.” Feminist theory is no “single system of thought”. Feminist theorist derive their analysis from multiple literary theories. They describe the diversity of feminist work as a quilt, but what seems to be missing from Humm’s patchwork is reader-response criticism. The author and Schweickart disagree with that approach, so when interpreting Budge Wilson’s “The Leaving” they approach it from a reader-response perspective focusing on the representations of women in literature.

The author of the chapter employs a think-aloud approach to describe an internal response to the modicum feminist evolution of the tireless mother figure. Described is the reader’s struggle with the mother’s impromptu trip with the daughter, but even more poignant, from a feminist perspective, is the return home to a place openly foreign to the liberation of second wave feminism. The mother figure seems to have been wholly left behind as women have moved on without her and left her home with a husband who will not even use her name. In the end, as described in the story summary, the mother succeeds in earning her right to be called by her name and, in the vein of a different plea for female freedom, Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” a space to which she can retreat from what must be exhausting male tyranny. In culmination, the author of the chapter emphasizes the uniquely feminist conclusion to the story. The narrator does not wrap up her view of her mother’s life with simple satisfaction, but with a veritable “patchwork” of reflective thoughts on a woman’s motivations. Women simply piece together what it is they feel they deserve and lay those pieces on the next generation with the hope that more will be added to the proverbial feminist quilt.

3-5 Takeaways of how to integrate this theory:
 * Analyzing women in literature - what roles do women play in the world of the text? Do we see women treated stereotypically?
 * Women as they relate to men in literature- What would be the author’s purpose in including a wife subjugated by a husband? How would that reflect on the daughter?
 * Analyzing imagery as it related to the characterization of a woman-How does a woman’s appearance alter our view of her role in her society/family/self-consciousness?
 * Women as they relate to other women-Does the author seem to push a sisterhood model? Is a daughter the victim of a mother’s insecurity? What are the origins of that insecurity and how do they relate to the way women are perceived in the society of the text?
 * Analysis of Point of View-Would the point of view change if a woman was the narrator? How does a female narration change our view of the text’s society/events?